From hotels throwing out leftover food to shopping malls discarding paper and plastic packaging, such large commercial premises alone churned out about 302,000 tonnes of waste last year, taking up 4 per cent of the total waste generated in Singapore.

And even though nine in 10 of such premises have their own recycling programmes, a report card on waste for the sector — the first sector required to submit such data — showed that its weighted average recycling rates remained below 10 per cent.

In a bid to cut waste and boost recycling, the Government is making it compulsory for large hotels and shopping malls to report how much waste they generate and their targets for reducing and recycling it.

Only hotels with more than 200 rooms and malls with net rental areas of more than 50,000 sq ft will have to do it.

In all, about 100 hotels and 74 malls will be affected by the measure, which will be introduced in 2014.

Environment and Water Resources Minister Vivian Balakrishnan announced the move on Tuesday.

Elaborating on it later, a National Environment Agency (NEA) spokesman said the outcome of the new measure would help decide whether it will be extended to ‘other commercial and industrial premises’.

Hotels and malls can generate more than 1,000kg of waste a day, while their recycling rate can be as low as 10 per cent or even less, said the spokesman.

This initiative aims to help hotels achieve better waste management and increase waste recycling rates. This is part of our ongoing outreach effort to encourage different industry sectors to play their part to recycle and contribute towards the recycling rate target of 70% by 2030. Currently, it is estimated that hotels in Singapore produce about 60,000 tonnes of solid waste a year and less than 10% of the waste is being recycled. Read more